


you found me

by moonsandstar_s



Category: RWBY
Genre: F/F, and it's bees and it's glorious, as we call it: it's the APOLObee, this is literally just. right between 6x01 and 6x02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 12:59:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16493087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonsandstar_s/pseuds/moonsandstar_s
Summary: It's then that Yang’s eyes turn towards her in the shadows, burning cold, dangerous as a gas flame in winter. And it is then and then only that that Blake realizes that every kind word that's passed like nonexistence between their renunion and now has served only to hide one thing: this, the raw torture written all over her face.If there was ever a frail chance that they might return to the innocent people they were on the night when the worst between them was a flickering candelabra and a few misunderstood words, it is now, here and on broken ground, that Blake watches it die along with the light in Yang’s eyes.





	you found me

**Author's Note:**

> i dedicate this to ash & erin for different reasons: ash, because i swore i'd never write fanfiction again and here i am, quitting what i quit, and erin, because she's the only one who can write hundreds of variations of the same love story, and make me cry every time.  
> title is from 'you found me' by the fray. makes you think differently about yang's perspective on all that's happened, and especially about her anger. give it a listen.

_“I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.”_  
  
_\- Ernest Hemingway, Garden of Eden_

* * *

   
Blake really, really resents the fact that her memory is still intact. Because, despite how she and her party were just flung from the side of a mountain railroad into the snow-swamped middle of nowhere, it means that she can remember perfectly well that her father predicted that her choice of clothing would come back to haunt her. There are a lot of things she hates in life, she admits it: most of it's stupid stuff, like getting wet, idiots, too-bright lights. But being cold tops the list—she’s _miserable._ She would kill, probably literally, for an extra pair of socks right now. 

“Is everyone okay?” Qrow calls out, his voice echoing strangely through the barren pines. “Nobody’s hurt?”

“Fine,” comes back Weiss’s voice, followed by Ruby’s affirmation, then by Yang’s. Blake’s breath eases in her chest and she tugs her trench-coat still tighter around her shoulders, her heart beating a grudging tempo in her chest, as if to remind her that she is, still, what’s been causing her problems for so long—alive.

“I’m okay,” she says as Qrow repeats himself. Which is—arguable. But she can walk and talk and still feels like shit, so she supposes she is, for all intents and purposes, fine.

“What do we do now?” Ruby staggers to her feet, hair dusted in snow, a stricken, forlorn look on her face. “I promised Jaune we would meet them in Argus. We’re stuck—how can we get out of here?”

Qrow glances at the wreckage of the train, and then up at the faraway mirage of the railroad winding away on the cliffside of the mountain. “We don’t have much choice but to walk,” he points out. “But I don’t think that’s a spectacular idea just yet. Seeing how things are.”

“Don’t forget the fact that we’ve gained a member to this lovely party,” Yang points out sourly, knocking snow off her gauntlet. “I don’t think Abuela Crazy will be down for a marathon through the snow.”

Blake hides a smile as, spitting furiously, the old woman turns in Yang’s direction and snaps, “My name is Maria Calavera, _not abuela.”_ She brandishes her cane theatrically, the strange goggles on her eyes flickering open and shut. “And I am not crazy! Just old. And slightly blind.”

“Sorry,” Yang mutters abashedly, before turning to Qrow. “Can’t we at least try to contact the others instead of walking off to God-knows-where and freezing our asses off? Last I checked, it wasn’t a crime to use a Scroll—”

“There’s no way Jaune and the others are close enough for us to get through to them,” Weiss interrupts irritably. Blake’s ears flatten. She probably has no right to complain of being cold; at least she has a coat and boots, whereas Weiss is standing in a knee-high drift of snow clad in only a dress and high-heels—though Blake knows her well enough to know that, though she’s probably cursing up a storm on the inside, she would rather die than voice it.

At least, she thinks so. She hasn’t seen Weiss in so long—it’s impossible to gauge what she’s like now, after so much lost time. Blake prefers fighting a swarm of Grimm on top of the train to this—at least then she knows where she stands. It’s easier to draw weapons than draw the words that will fix the break between herself and the people around her, and she has no idea where to begin.

“And as for walking,” Oscar puffs, his breath smoking, “we’re not gonna be able to catch a train that’s going over eighty miles an hour.”

“Thank you, Captain Encouragement,” snaps Yang. “Any other wonderful words of wisdom for us?”

“Sorry,” Oscar says, looking sheepish. “Just saying. Trying to bring some perspective to this sucky situation. Ozpin says maybe it’s worth a shot to try lighting a signal fire?" 

Yang mutters that Oz can take his signal fire and shove it, but as to where, Blake never finds out, because at that moment, a sharp  _crack_ like a gunshot shivers through the air. Qrow swears loudly as a branch above his head plummets, burying him beneath a pile of snow. Moments later, a soaked crow wiggles out of the drift, hopping onto a clear patch of ground before becoming an equally-soaked Qrow. Oscar backs up a step as Qrow whirls on him, looking murderous.

“You,” he rasps, “should do your thing, bucko, because the thing in your head has some explaining to do about this.” He thrusts forward the relic, scowling, his face awash in its eerie blue light. “Care to tell me what possessed you to make you believe carrying a ready-made Grimm magnet onto a train full of innocent people was a fantastic idea?” 

“Or tell _us,”_ Yang hisses. “It was stupid of us to expect you’d actually stop playing the long-game and start treating us like we’re worthy of knowing secrets that involve our lives, wasn’t it?”

Oscar’s gaze flashes yellow, his spine straightening. The shimmering shift that shudders through those eyes every time Ozpin takes over Oscar’s body fascinates and sickens Blake in equal measure: she can’t get used to the idea of a person splitting two souls, not when it’s taken so perfectly from a realm of fantasy. And it’s disconcerting to see him change like that—a fifteen-year-old boy with an elocution as lilting and whimsical as a lullaby speaking in the forceful, relentless way that Ozpin has: “You are both overreacting far too much for such an easily explained incident, if you would just _let_ me—”

“Don’t try to charm your way out of this, Oz,” snarls Qrow, hands white-knuckled on the relic’s handle. “Were you honestly operating under the assumption that the worst wouldn’t happen? With this _and_ me around?” 

Blake’s attention is torn away by a series of of a crackling  _pops._ At the treeline, the old woman has cleared away a patch of frozen ground and succeeded in coaxing a flame to life from a few shards of flint and frozen wood. She stabs her cane in the direction of the group, glancing up with those strange mechanical goggles at Ruby. “Come here, child.”

Anxiety is written all over Ruby’s face. “Me?”

The old woman pats the patch of bare ground next to the fire. “Yes, _cariño_ , you. You’re going to catch cold if you don’t warm yourself.”

Apparently, Ruby’s sense wins out over her fear; with a backwards glance at the others, she obeys. Weiss trails her like a shadow, and Blake is left hovering uncertainly in the snow as the two crouch at the edge of the fire, amber light flickering hot over their expressions. They begin to chat animatedly, though Blake only catches snatches of their exchange, most of it involving surreptitious glances at Ozpin and Qrow’s bickering. Another survey of the area reveals that Yang has vanished—Blake’s heart climbs to her mouth—but then she glimpses a solitary set of footprints and the scuffing of motorcycle tires in the dunes of snow, leading into the rear-end of the broken train.

The snowstorm is beginning to pick up with more ferocity than ever. It’s down to hunching at the edge of some pathetic fire, listening to Qrow and Ozpin’s voices rise in anger, or facing the music. She swallows her uncertainties, wraps her arms protectively around herself, and follows the footsteps into the depthless gloom.

In the mouth of the train, she pauses. “Yang?”

“I’m not going back outside, so don’t even try to ask me for that,” the darkness grumbles back to her, before Blake’s vision adjusts to reveal the interior of the train, luggage strewn haphazardly from the force of the crash. In the heart of the cabin, Yang is bowed over Bumblebee, her hair curtained over her face to hide her expression. There’s a fine dusting of snow across her hair, the delicate arch of her spine, slowly melting now that they’re out of the storm.

“I didn’t think so.” Blake hesitates. “You seem upset at Osc—Ozpin. Why?”

“Well, _yeah.”_ Yang shifts, now frowning at an unraveling stitch in the leather of the motorcycle’s seat. “I don’t want to listen to that idiot spout more _for-the-greater-good_ excuses. He didn’t lie, he just forgot to tell the truth, and if he didn’t forget to tell the truth, we didn’t ask the right questions to get it.” Blake sees a muscle jump in her jaw. “I’m just done playing mind-games with people that don’t seem to care.”

Heat surfaces to Blake’s cheek like the sting of a slap. She struggles to get out her next sentence. “So you—don’t trust him anymore.”

“Maybe. No. I don’t know.” Yang pats the chrome finish of the motorcycle’s body, her expression lost in the gloom. “He seemed all world-wise when he was our headmaster. And only our headmaster. I liked him then. I guess because had his quirks and seemed so—human; like, he let my sister go to Beacon, he seemed to care about her, and I thought it was because he respected that being a Huntress was her biggest dream. But then I found out that he only did all of that to keep her under his wing, so that she wouldn’t be damaged for when the time came for her to be useful to him. It’s like he’s… he’s not involved in this, not like we are. He’s just watching and waiting. Moving us around to the most strategical places to win his war.” She paces further back into the train, her voice absent of inflection when she speaks. “You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t play with people like they’re chess pieces. Not when the outcome of the game can hurt them.”

Blake takes a step towards her, the whistle and plunge of the blizzard wind a distant thing at her back. “Will you ever trust him again?”

“I don't know," Yang fires back. "Why does it matter?" 

"I—just want to know." 

“Well, I’m not saying it’s Ozpin’s fault that there’s evil people who want to hurt us, and he’s not wrong to fight against them. But when you’re fighting for good without remembering _why_ goodness is worth the fight…” Yang’s grin is a dark mirror with a distorted reflection: mocking, hollow. “Seems kind of backward, doesn’t it?” 

Blake’s heart sinks somewhere past her toes and into the warped floorboards. “He just made one mistake. And now you completely hate him.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Yang presses her. “Why should I listen? Why should I trust that he’ll do what’s best? I’d be stupid to just accept his directions without questioning him.” A sour note creeps into her voice. “I’ve already lost enough blindly rushing into things, don’t you think?”

The breath is punched out of her lungs, and Blake sees everything and nothing in the silence between heartbeats: a bone-white mask, a terrible smile, red of sword and red of blood. A wind-swept night, a broken moon reflecting in broken glass, fire dancing like the devil over walls that had once held warmth, and suddenly, she’s back there, she’s back at the night that everything shattered, but then again, maybe she never left it at all.

“T—this is all my fault,” she manages.

“There we go, Blake.” Yang’s little laugh, when it comes, ragged, from the shadows, is anything but amused. “I don’t think any of this is about Ozpin after all.” 

“Please come into the light,” Blake whispers. “I can’t see you. I’ve spent so long not seeing you. I’ve been…” She shuts her eyes, almost grateful for the feeling of the tears on her cheeks for the heat that they bring, but she tells herself that she will not cry. She _won’t._ “Yang, I—I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t need to use Ozpin as an allegory to ask me how I feel about you being back,” Yang mutters, but obligingly, she emerges from the shadows, her arms folded. Blake thinks of a silent and dark castle, drawbridge held up high, surrounded by barbed wire on all sides. “I already told you we’re fine.” 

“You said we’re _going_ to be fine,” Blake shoots back, frustrated. “But when? We aren’t, not now. We’re the farthest thing from fine.”

“We will be,” Yang replies in a vague tone, still focused on her motorcycle with her head bowed and eyes hidden. “Eventually. I guess.” 

“You—I don’t think that you even believe that.”

“How would you know?” Yang finally turns to stare her down—her face is guarded, her eyes so carefully neutral that it hurts to look at; but there is always a chink even in the best-made armor, and in her current state, Blake thinks she’d have to dead to miss the anguish she sees there. “You haven’t been around to know what I believe or not.” She shivers, like she’s trying to knock the snow that’s already vanished off her shoulders. “Look, I really don’t want to talk about this—”

 _“You can’t even look me in the eyes, Yang.”_ Blake’s ears are pinned flat to her skull, every cell in her body straining to flee, every fiber of her heart rooting her to the floorboards below. “Stop acting like you’re not furious with—”

“I’m not,” Yang snarls, cutting her off. “You have no idea what I am, Blake. No _goddamn_ idea.”

“If this is about you punishing me for leaving you,” Blake whispers, “you could never punish me worse than I’ve already punished myself.”

“You think that this is about _punishing_ you for—for running away?” Something bleak shifts in Yang’s face; she begins to pace the far end of the cabin, each movement tight and restless, a lion walking wounded. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t know what else,” Blake gets out, her throat constricting in on itself, “I’m supposed to think.”

“Then let me help you understand,” Yang responds, her voice strange and jagged. “When I was a kid, Taiyang taught me that I could survive any tragedy in the world. All I had to do was make my pain threshold impossible to cross—any tragedy, just so long as I really wanted to. The trick, in his words, was that I had to fool my brain into believing that pain was just, and only, a meaningless message sent from my nerves. An insignificant thing. Something I could ignore, block out, fake into nonexistence, as long as I focused hard enough.” Yang closes her eyes. “My mother leaving. Summer dying. Taiyang failing us. Penny and Pyrrha and Ruby—” A terrible, bleak smile flickers across her lips. “All those messages I saw without feeling. All those lives that I lost without loving. I didn’t think anything could ever break me, because I wouldn’t let myself be a glass person, shattering under fire. You said it yourself: I’m strong. I go with the flow, and life just seems so goddamned _easy,_ when you’re blocking all these calls that want you to _feel,_ that want you to break, that want you to give in, just a little bit, just for a moment—”

 _“Yang,”_ Blake manages, a heartbroken little noise that sounds like it belongs to a stranger, but it's then that Yang’s eyes turn towards her in the shadows, burning cold, dangerous as a gas flame in winter. And it is then and then only that that Blake realizes that every kind word that's passed like nonexistence between their renunion and now has served only to hide one thing: this, the raw torture written all over her face.

If there was ever a frail chance that they might return to the innocent people they were on the night when the worst between them was a flickering candelabra and a few misunderstood words, it is now, here and on broken ground, that Blake watches it die along with the light in Yang’s eyes.

“I woke up the night Beacon fell. Alone. I took the flight back home. Alone. And I was made of glass—broken glass. _You left me alone.”_ Yang’s expression just _crumples,_ then, dimming to tears, and it’s the worst thing that Blake has ever seen. It’s a battle ended by tragedy. It’s a beautiful thing turned to dust. It’s the sun dying in winter. It’s Yang, invincibility fallen to pieces. “That’s what you don’t understand. Adam turned me to glass, but you’re the one who just—just left me in broken shards—like it was better for me to exist in pieces than as someone you were scared to see was different, breakable, broken—”

“And I _wanted_ to not feel that, Blake. I wanted to be fine with the fact that you were gone but I _wasn’t,_ and I couldn’t be. Not after the message that I got that night: it wasn’t that I was still alive, despite almost dying. Despite losing my arm. The message was that I had—somewhere, somehow—let you slip through my hold. The message was that I wasn’t enough. The message was that you had _vanished_ , that you were just a shadow that had disappeared with the rising of the sun, to where I couldn’t chase after you, even if I wanted to. And I—I wanted you—not forever but just to stay, just to tell me I was going to be okay—” She scrubs at her face, weeping as silently, as calmly, as she can, but it’s like watching a bird struggle in a trap: something beautiful reduced to a fleeting, solitary moment of agony.  
  
She continues on. "But that’s a lie now. It’s _not_ okay, Blake. It’s not, none of this. You didn’t make it possible for us to have been broken, but you broke us. And now you have the nerve to look me in the eyes and tell me you haven’t _seen_ me! After I spent every night, alone, on the threshold of a pain that was unbearable. The nerve to say that _this_ is your fault.” She rolls her prosthetic fingers, scattering the echoing ghosts of a thousand things that have never come to pass. “Not this. Never this. But the blame lies _here._ ” She nods her head towards the space that separates them—only a few feet of carpeted floor, at first glance; in reality, an endless gulf that’s howling like the snow outside. “The message you shouldn’t ignore, Blake, is that I never was, and never will be, the kind of person that was strong enough to recover from the knowledge that you weren’t back for me, and that despite how much I loved you, it wasn’t enough cause for you to stay.”

Blake can’t speak. She’s afraid to open her mouth because she’s terrified that the hell inside of her will come roaring out, a wounded beast of her own shattered glass and silenced messages, and she’s staring at something that’s tormented and dying. Choking because she’s trapped in her life of breaking the bridge, burning it, and then running away as it collapses in the dark. She can’t _fix_ this: as delicate as a butterfly’s wing, as tortured as a shadow in the sun. She is left only with an armful of useless words: _I am sorry,_ and _please forgive me_ , and _I missed you,_ and none of them enough to encompass what she really means, which is _I loved you, and I think every part of me always will, and if that love is gone, then I don’t know who I am or what I will be anymore._

Yang’s sitting astride Bumblebee now, that twisted smile still fixed on her lips as she watches Blake like she would watch a sleeping wolf. It’s such a return to normalcy. She almost looks like the old Yang again, only: her arm. And those broken, broken eyes.

“Blake,” she says. “Nothing left to say?”

“I am…” Blake’s gasping. Her lungs are turning traitor on her. She can barely breathe, dry-eyed and awash on a distant shore, where the searchlights cannot find her, cannot bring her back home. “I am so sorry.”

“I know you’re sorry. You are. I believe it because I can see it all over your face.” Yang’s expression hardens. “But do you think being sorry matters? I don’t need you to say it, and I don’t want you to. You can’t apologize for not wanting to stay with me anymore than I can apologize for being broken by it. There are things in life that we make, and then there are things that just are. And you not needing me the way that I need you...” She shrugs. “That’s one of them.”

Blake collapses into one of the benches lining the walls, her head falling into her hands, shaking all over. She wants to say so much and yet it’s trapped in her throat, cowering in the darkness, petrified of entering the light. Her words, imprisoned in a cage of fear. The cage that she can never escape. _I loved and I loved and I lost you, still._

“I would have done it again,” Yang tells her, pushing the hair back from her head in a deliberately casual motion. “I didn’t know if you knew that.”

Blake at her, wretchedly, through the gaps in her fingers. “What?”

“I would go back to that night and I wouldn’t change what I did,” she mutters. “In case that’s what this is all about. None of that was… you can’t blame yourself for it.”

“You had too much to lose,” Blake gets out. “You lost—” She takes a deep, steadying breath, and restarts. “You lost an arm. I know. But you could have lost your life. You could’ve… you could have lost so much more.”

“My life is a small price to pay. Don’t look at me like that, Blake. It sounds horrible, I know, but it’s true.” Yang lifts one shoulder, not quite a shrug, wound-up as a taut string. “Don’t you get it? If I could have lost you, too, then I would have fought to keep you safe, despite anything, despite everything, no matter what hell there would be to pay. Which made it worth it, to risk anything I had to bring you back to me. Even if it was my life.” She experimentally makes a fist with the prosthetic, before slowly uncurling the metallic fingers. “I lost you, in the end, but I still wouldn’t change anything. It was better, after everything, to know that you were alive, somewhere, not needing me, than if you'd died and I hadn't been there to save you."  
  
Blake closes her eyes for a moment, only a moment. And she just… she _wants._ She wants to rewrite this story. It should have been a fairy tale and it’s turned into a nightmare. She wants to kill Adam for smothering the spark between her and Yang before it even had a chance to become a flame. But most of all, she just wants, she _needs_ , to be able to look Yang in the eyes without falling apart from the weight of the selfish love that rests unspoken on her shoulders, but she doesn’t even know where to begin. She’s so tired and Yang is a universe away, and Blake is here, stuck on the ground, so desperately in love with a distant star that everything around her is washed-out and gray.

“That’s not true,” she whispers.

“It is,” Yang says quietly, resignation thick in her voice. “It is true. You didn’t need to stay. I just realized it before you did. And I’ll just have to accept that people leave me eventually; all that matters now is that we’re back together. I guess it’s better if I know now that you’d always have ended up leaving eventually, anyways.” She looks up, past Blake; snow is swirling like an army of ghosts, scuffing across the top of the drifts and kicking up strange wraiths in the world that waits outside. The sting of the cold is almost unbearable, but Blake can’t feel a thing. “They’ll be done arguing about their ridiculous power-struggle any second. We should go.”

“I saw you,” Blake says into her hands as Yang begins to walk away. “The night that we lost each other. I saw you through the broken glass, when Adam saw you. If I hadn’t looked… if I’d just… I could have prevented any of this from—”

Yang stops at the entrance, head bowed. “I was screaming for you at the top of my lungs,” she remarks, her back to Blake. “He would have noticed me, no matter what. Stop saying this is your fault. It changes nothing.”

“It changes _everything,”_ Blake says lowly. “There’s so much more you don’t—the things he said, the things he threatened to do—and he has always done exactly what he promises—”

“Blake,” Yang interrupts, uneasily, but she can't stop. 

“No. I have to—you should know. You have a right to know.” Her voice sounds strange to her ears: breathless, wild. “We fought. Before you arrived. He—I wasn’t strong enough to win, not against him. He… got me down on the ground. I was just… _helpless.”_ Disgust laces her words. “And this is what he told me. He told me that he would destroy everything I loved. Everything.” Blake feels a tear snake down her cheek. “Starting with you.” 

“And then I ran in, right?” Yang returns. “I messed everything up. My fear of losing you was the catalyst to make it happen, in the end. And we’re back to the present day. Nothing changes.” 

“Not quite,” Blake says. “I… I was the one who distracted Adam long enough to grab you and run, and I think it’s the only thing I have to be proud of on that night. That I stopped being a coward only after it didn’t matter anymore.” Blake wipes her nose on her sleeve. “I don’t know how I did it, Yang, and I doubt I’ll ever find out, at this point. I was… we were both completely wrecked, we were both bleeding out, all over the courtyard. I think you must have been dying. I think maybe we both were. But I just kept telling myself that I had to go a little farther, just a little farther, to get you to someplace where he couldn’t hurt you again, and it kept me together long enough to make it to safe ground.”

“I never knew,” Yang says, her voice strange, “who got me out of there after he attacked me. I always wondered who had saved me. It—it was you.” She turns around, then, her eyes a conflicted, stormy shade, like a sky caught between violet hurricane and scarlet sunset. “You dragged me out of there? Even after he’d tried to kill you?" 

“Nothing in heaven or hell,” Blake says, “could have made me done otherwise.” She grits her teeth, ears lowering. “I’m not saying that I blame myself for Adam hurting you. Not really. I couldn’t—I couldn’t fix Adam. Once a monster, and always. I… I thought the thing that scared me the most in this world was the idea that my life would be a wasted opportunity, but I realized... it’s losing you for good that terrifies me more than anything. And Adam knew it.” 

“So why all of this, Blake?” Yang asks, barely above a whisper, her eyes so, so saddened. “Why did you have to leave me?” 

“Because staying would have meant losing you, anyways!” Blake shouts. “I didn’t know what else to do!” 

The silence is tangible, laughing in the dark. Yang just looks at her, indecipherable. 

“If I didn’t love you,” Blake says hollowly, “I would have stayed.” She’s crying now, and she hates it, hates the feeling of the tears freezing on her cheeks, but everything inside of her is splitting its seams. “In the courtyard, that night... when I finally let you go after I’d pulled you to safety, I knew it was only temporary. Seeing you there, just… _broken._ It was like waking up and realizing the sun had gone out. Impossible, but right there in front of my eyes. I… I stayed until the ships came to take you away. And then I remembered what I was.” Bitterness seeps through her words. “A coward. So I ran. Because I couldn’t fight, and only by running could I keep you safe. I realized… I realized that I had nothing to show for what I had done. I had fought Adam, but nothing had changed, nothing… then I held you in my arms and almost watched you die, and I escaped him but only for so many numbered days, and I had to look down at you and think that someday down the line you might get hurt even worse because my presence only resulted in danger—” She breaks off, jamming her fists into the pockets of her coat. “I knew I’d have to go. Right then. Before it was too late. And I couldn’t explain what I was _doing._ I couldn’t; how could I?” Biting her lip, Blake strides away to the mouth of the train where Yang stands, feeling like a plummeting trapeze artist, the tethers cut, the safety net gone. Outside, the world is a picture painted in gray, the trees stabbing black against the empty sky. “This is what I knew, Yang. I didn’t think of what it would be like for you when you woke up and I was gone. I’ve regretted it every day, but I ran thinking only of one thing, and that was how to keep you safe from the things I could never control.” Blake lets out a long, shuddering breath. “Adam wasn’t the only one who swore something that night. If he made it his duty to destroy everything I ever loved, then I made it mine to keep you safe. Even if it killed me. Even if it destroyed me, too.” She shakes her head, the words warped around her weeping. “Everything I do, I do to protect you. I— I have been _made_ to protect you. Only in death will I be kept from doing so." 

“Just tell me something,” Yang whispers, a tremor running through her, her prosthetic shaking violently. “You say that Adam would have left me alone if he hadn’t… if he hadn’t seen…”

Blake forces herself to exhale, inhale, bringing a sense of rhythm to this horrible dissonance. There’s something electric slipping through her veins, a heady mixture of terror and sorrow. “If he hadn’t seen something in you that scared him,” she says. “The love that I had for you. I don’t think he was frightened that someone else had entered my world. He was scared because he could see someone else had become my universe.” She stands, hands clenched low at her sides, her breath constricted and shallow in her chest; it’s like she’s drowning, somewhere, treading ice-water way off that distant shore, where nobody’s around to pull her to safety. “I saw you come looking for me, that night, and it was then that I realized that I was in love with you, and it was like shaking a tree, and knocking down all of heaven.”

The snow howls like a wolf. Blake can hear everything, her ears pricking against her own better judgement: the sounds of the others outside, the branches creaking in the wind, Yang’s breath, uneven as the aftershocks of a tidal wave. She remains utterly still, silent as a creature buried under the weight of the world.

And then: “You _were_ in love _?”_

Blake’s almost too scared to look up, but the hope that wakes in her chest makes it impossible to stay still, so she does. “Am,” she corrects herself. “That I still am. Always.” 

Yang watches her for a second, disbelief on her face, before it gives way to something much more raw, and much more real. “It’s so hard to stay mad at you,” she says with a hollow laugh. “I wasn’t very good at it when you were gone. And I’m terrible at it now. I just—” She wipes at her nose with her sleeve, looking so very, very shattered. “I love you more than I probably should. You know that, don’t you?”

“Please forgive me for leaving you alone,” Blake manages. “Yang. I’m—I’m here. For good. Forever.”

Yang closes the space between them in two steps, wrapping her arms around Blake, and Blake feels all the breath rush from her lungs from the sheer forgiveness in that one tiny, enormous gesture: it’s sun and wildflowers, wildness and fire, love and home. Blake buries her head against Yang’s chest and tries to breathe, but there’s this: love, and love lost, and love found again.

“I love you,” Blake whispers into her sleeve. “For now, for tomorrow, for every day that I haven’t been here to say it. It’s you. It’s always you.”

Yang presses her closer, the beat of her heart a staggering and joyous tempo in Blake’s ears. Her lips press against Blake’s hair, the dampness of her tears frigid on Blake’s forehead. She doesn’t speak, but it’s the things she’s not saying that are the loudest, suspended in the hands that hold her close, the warmth that drives away the cold, the tears on her cheeks. She’s not clinging to Yang, not exactly, and Yang’s not clinging to her, either; they’re just existing as they should, holding onto each other without letting go, and Blake feels, for the first time ever since a bleak autumn night a year ago, her heart crying out in relief: _safe, safe, safe._

 


End file.
